


as a second language

by youcallitwinter



Category: Lost
Genre: F/M, Flash Sideways Verse, Gen, Season Six Alternate Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-19 21:59:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1485550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youcallitwinter/pseuds/youcallitwinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's crushing on him, he knows, like his son is crushing on her, and they're both too young to know better.</p><p>[jack; jack/claire, jack/his issues] [oneshot]</p>
            </blockquote>





	as a second language

Living with a woman in the house again is a step— forward or back— he’s not quite sure after Juliet, but it’s something.  
  
Not that it makes much of a difference, when that woman is Claire, in any other way than that the laundry suddenly has a lot more colors than just the black and white of his suits and the blue of the hospital gown, and occasionally when he wakes up, he can smell pancakes.  
  
She smiles, glowing, a hand protectively covering her stomach, flipping the pancake over in the pan with an expert twist of her other wrist, “I thought you might like some before you left.”  
  
It’s something about the way she can never quite meet his eyes, always looking somewhere to the left of his face, that tells him this is another of her ways of paying him for letting her stay with him.  
  
He won’t argue with her, because yes, he would like some before he leaves, and if it makes her feel like this arrangement is a little less one-sided, a little more quid pro quo, then that makes it all right, he’d imagine.  
  
  
  
-   
  
  
  
She’d bought up rent once, twisting the couch cover in her hands, and he’d shifted his gaze from the television to her, and said something like  _don’t be silly, Claire, we’re family_ , which, of course, is the truth, and forgotten all about it.   
  
But apparently she hasn’t, because sometimes when he comes back, she’s on her knees, scrubbing the dirt from the corners of the living room, and she doesn't look at him when she tells him brightly that she  _likes_  cleaning.  
  
He hadn’t known what to say to that; he’s never been the guy to be able to smooth over an awkward situation, and his bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired, so he'd used the only argument he could think of.  
  
“You shouldn’t be bending down so much; it isn’t good for the baby.”  
  
She’d looked at him then out of wide blue eyes then, hand automatically moving towards her swollen belly as it so frequently did. But she’d stopped playing him part-time maid after that, so he could count it as a victory of sorts.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
There are still other things she does though, apart from the pancakes; like his handkerchief neatly pressed and folded on the dining table, the car keys on the dresser without fail, things that remind him of Juliet almost painfully, and he has to manage the  _thanks_  around clenched teeth, while she avoids his gaze, and he stares down at her bent head and remembers another blonde woman he'd fallen in love with.  
  
But she's there when he comes back, every day, in soft sweaters and loose jeans, looking for all the world like a teenager (he's not exactly sure how old she is, and he doesn't want to bring it up. Doesn't want to know  _when_  his father--), and when she shifts closer to David to make room for him, handing him the remote, he sinks in the couch, exhausted, and doesn't try to cover up the new memories with the old.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
"I don't feel like you're my brother sometimes," she says, in a hushed whisper, like it's a secret, as if she's a little embarrassed by the admission.  
  
He doesn't feel like she's his sister, either. Not with the golden hair and the blue eyes, and the resemblance that he catches glimpses of sometimes, but can't capture into anything solid. Not after thirty seven years of being alone.   
  
But he doesn't believe much in feelings anyway. The fact is, she  _is_  his sister. And facts, he believes in.  
  
  
  
-

 

 

He's not quite sure when he first realizes he makes her nervous. But he thinks it's when he puts his hand on her stomach to feel the baby kick, holding her other hand reassuringly as he assumes a brother would, and her pulse skyrockets.   
  
And when he looks up after, she's staring straight at him, her eyes liquid, and his head trips over something clumsy like,  _oh_.  
  
He doesn't know if its transference issues; being abandoned by the man she'd loved, with a definitive, permanent trace of that love. But he's still pretty sure some medical journal somewhere has a name for the condition, even though he'd always found the psychology lectures to be the most useless in med school. If wounds were existed, they showed, and they could be fixed; that was the golden rule. Abstract talks about nothing in particular bored him. They were mostly just excuses to make people feel better about being spectacularly messed up.  
  
He finds himself wishing he'd listened a little more closely then, as he takes a step back, and shoves his hands in his pockets instead.  
  
Claire is gorgeous, he knows, objectively. She is also his half-sister, he knows, objectively. Considering he graduated a year early from Columbia, he’s definitely done enough math in his life to know when the equations on either side of the sign cancel each other out.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
Claire loses the baby.  
  
It was inevitable, Margo would have said. To allow yourself to want something so badly is setting yourself up against the universe.  
  
Jack is not his mother.  
  
These things happen, he knows. He knows the approximate perinatal mortality rate in the country, and the statistical data for the complications that can arise on the operation table, even in an otherwise straightforward pregnancy. Mistaking accidents for fate is the common man’s folly.  
  
Jack is not a common man either.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
He stops the car outside the apartment flat.  
  
“We’re home.” he says, unnecessarily, when she continues to stare outside the passenger side window.  
  
She opens the car door at that, obediently getting off. He locks the door behind him, and follows her.  
  
Her movements are stiff, he notes clinically, walking behind her, trying to categorize whether the stiffness is a side-effect of the drugs or grief. He’ll have to talk to her physician.   
  
He takes her coat off for her inside. There is no light coming from David’s room; although he’d been awake an hour before, according to the timestamp on the text he’d sent, which Jack had forgotten to reply to. David loves Claire with all the adoration of a teenage boy for a beautiful woman who sits and listens to him play the piano for hours.  
  
He guides her to her room, a hand on her elbow, when she looks around with the same dull, lost gaze that she’s worn since she first opened her eyes at the hospital after…after.  
  
“I’m sorry,” she says, sitting on the bed, hands wrapped around her knees, startling him a little, “for being like this.”  
  
He thinks he should say something comforting then, but the exact diagram for sympathy was absent from his college textbooks, so he’s never learnt how, “that’s okay.”  
  
She nods, slowly, getting up to close the door behind him, “okay.”  
  
She trips over the carpet, as she reaches him, hand instinctively coming to rest against her stomach to save something already lost.   
  
Her face falls, and the anguished sound that escapes her has him blindly reaching out.  
  
This is an accident: he kisses her first.  
  
This is an accident: he doesn’t think of Juliet when he does.  
  
(Don’t mistake accidents for fate, he should have thought. Didn't.)  
  
  
  
- 

 

 

That could be reflex, he knows. Not a physical reflex, but a psychological reflex. A genetic model for sympathy ingrained in the human race as a whole, if not him personally.   
  
Kissing someone, even your half-sister, doesn’t have to  _mean_  anything. It’s a way of reaching out, trying to touch someone.  
  
He’s not a man of faith, he doesn’t look for deeper meanings, but your head between your half-sister’s thighs, that, that probably means—  
  
— something.  
  
She's crushing on him, he knows, like his son is crushing on her, and they're both too young to know better. He's not. He's too old to not know better,  _goddammit_.  
  
She clutches too hard when he moves up, and he can feel her nails digging into his back, probably drawing out blood. Her movements are rough, and it’s too fast, much too fast, and there are times when he thinks he’s hurting her.  
  
 _Slow down_ , he says,  _Claire, slow down_.  
  
She looks at him, eyes clouded over with lust and grief and he’s not just fucking his half-sister, he’s taking advantage of a gi—woman incapable of knowing better in the moment.   
  
 _I can’t_ , she says in reply,  _I can't_.  
  
He can’t touch her, he realizes halfway through. He can put his hands and mouth where he wants, where she’s letting him, but he can’t touch her.  
  
He comes, she doesn’t. It’s fitting in a way, he supposes.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
The third time he fucks Claire, he can hear David moving around in his room; the occasionally sounds of things being shifted filtering through his consciousness.  
  
He’s fucking his little sister in the room next to his son. He’s not a man of faith, but he thought he's always believed in ethics of the profession. Believed in  _not_  fucking his little sister in the room next to his son. Now he’s not sure what he is.  
  
“You can’t fix me, you know” she shrugs, once, after. He’s tracing meaningless letters on the skin above her hip-bone, and he should get up, he really should.  
  
That makes him look up, “I wasn’t trying—”  
  
“Yes,” she says, steadily, “you were. But it’s okay. I don’t mind. You can try.”  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
“How is she doing,” Juliet asks him, quietly.  
  
 _Last I know_ , he wants to say,  _grieving. Broken. Wet, hot, tight. In your bed._  It makes him feel a little guilty, the thought. He should be feeling a lot guiltier. He bites his tongue down instead, feeling the copper fill his mouth.  
  
Juliet holding David’s bag, for his weekend with her, and all he can think of is two days of more of the same; Claire’s body and his hands and Claire’s mouth on his and the sound she makes when he touches that spot on her back.   
  
He knows her reasons; the medical conditions start right down from PTSD, he'd highlighted it once with neon marker in a book long forgotten. He doesn’t know what his excuse is, and he doesn’t know why he hasn’t made one up yet. He doesn’t know if there’s a theory for this feeling. Case studies, perhaps.  
  
“She’ll be better,” he says, and wishes he believed that. Wishes he believed in something. Anything.   
  
Wishes he wasn’t the guy fucking his sister, because she’s beautiful and he wants to fix her, and he has a habit of falling in love like that. Wishes he wasn’t half in love already with his father’s daughter. Wishes he hadn’t been from the moment she’d walked in and needed saving, because he always needs someone to save.  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
(Claire smiles at up at him, once, when he kisses her later. Fleeting. Gone before he can acknowledge it.  
  
But he thinks he might. Believe. Just a little.  
  
“I wish I was near the ocean,” she twists the sheets in her hand, “I don’t know why, but it’s just—I just wish I was.” Maybe that's Christian's genes talking, something in their shared blood that makes them want too much.  
  
She tastes like the ocean; he realizes, suddenly, inexplicably; part water, part salt, part thirst.  
  
And, for some reason, part homecoming.  
  
He should stop, then, should have stopped all the times before. He kisses her again, instead; he's been lost long enough.)  
  
  
  
 **[fin]**


End file.
